Annette Beaumanoir obituary
Neurophysiologist who worked for the French resistance only to turn against her homeland when she fought for Algerian independence
Annette Beaumanoir was a wartime medical student in Paris. She was also a member of the French Communist Party, working with the resistance to undermine the Nazi occupation and the collaborationist Vichy regime. Her parents, who ran a small restaurant in northwest France, frequently sent her food parcels that arrived via friends.
One day in June 1944, those friends told Beaumanoir that they had learnt of an impending police raid in the 13th arrondissement. They asked her to warn a woman called Victoria, who was sheltering a Jewish family named Lisopravski. Although the Communist Party did not permit unauthorised rescues, Beaumanoir visited Victoria’s apartment and met the Lisopravskis. Two of their children, Daniel, 16, and Simone, 14, agreed to leave with her.
She took the teenagers to a shelter used by the resistance and then left the city on an errand. While she was gone the shelter was raided by the Gestapo. Everyone there was arrested except for Daniel and Simone, who escaped over the rooftop of an adjoining cinema and found a temporary new hiding place in the 18th arrondissement.
When Beaumanoir returned to Paris she decided to take the two Jewish youngsters to her parents’ house in rural Brittany. Her mother, Marthe, was waiting for them at the station, even as her father, Jean, was being questioned at the police station after the authorities had found his name and address during a raid on his daughter’s room in Paris. The investigation proved fruitless and Jean was released without charge. Marthe took Daniel and Simone into the family home, where Simone helped in the restaurant and Daniel worked with the gardener.
After the liberation of France the Lisopravskis remained in touch with their rescuers and in August 1996 Beaumanoir and her parents were recognised by Yad Vashem, the Holocaust remembrance organisation, as “righteous among the nations”. Asked why she had risked not only her own life but also her parents’ lives, Beaumanoir replied: “I hate racism. For me, it’s a physical thing.”
Yet her resistance work was far from over. After the war she ended up in Marseilles but fell out with the Communist Party after being put to work on its women’s magazine. Meanwhile, she had married a nerve specialist called Joseph Roger. They became friendly with a group of priests who were working with members of the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN), which was seeking independence for their country from French colonial rule. “My husband and I took care of treating Algerian militants, therefore fully fledged illegal immigrants,” she explained.
Beaumanoir grew increasingly dismayed by reports of atrocities being carried out by the French during the war of independence (1954-62), comparing them to the actions of the Nazis. According to Anne Weber’s story of Beaumanoir’s life, told in free verse in Epic Annette (to be published in English this August): “Has she really/ risked her life for this country so that/ a few years later, it uses SS methods itself?/ Bitterness and anger.”
In November 1959 “the red doctor”, as she became known, was arrested on terrorism charges, a move that shocked local society. “The city of Marseilles has never had a bigger talking point in many a long year,” reported one British newspaper. “Annette Beaumanoir has beauty and charm, position and money, and she has in being arrested made herself a focal point of conversation on the greatest subject of domestic discord confronting France today.”
She was sentenced to ten years by a military tribunal and was held in solitary confinement at Baumettes prison, Marseilles. In time she was allowed to socialise and soon found herself helping her fellow inmates with their correspondence, including writing letters from a murderess to her husband. She recalled encountering port prostitutes, postwar orphans and others whom she would “never have met otherwise”, adding: “I was a kind of star there.”
However, Beaumanoir was pregnant and after a few months was temporarily released for the birth of a son, her third child. During that time she fled to Tunisia, leaving behind her husband and children; he died in 2012. There she worked as a psychiatrist with soldiers from the FLN who had been traumatised by the war. After the signing of the 1962 Évian Accords, which brought peace and eventually independence to Algeria, President Ahmed Ben Bella granted her Algerian citizenship.
Bella was deposed in 1965 and Beaumanoir fled once more. Unable to return to France because of her unfinished sentence, she instead settled in Switzerland and for the next 25 years ran the mental health services at the University Hospitals of Geneva.
In the preface to her memoir, Le feu de la mémoire (The fire of memory, 2009), Beaumanoir suggests that if she had her time again she would do much the same. “In old age, the behaviour of that time may seem absurd to us, like the sins of youth,” she writes, adding that “under similar circumstances, and in the same surroundings, everything would have happened exactly as it did in the old days”. Asked during one of her many school talks if she had ever stopped fighting, she replied emphatically: “Non!”
Anne Beaumanoir, known as Annette, was born in Brittany in 1923, the daughter of Jean Beaumanoir, a champion cyclist who competed in the Tour de France in the early 1920s. He was disinherited by his wealthy family after falling for Marthe Brunet, a cowgirl from peasant stock. Anne was born before her parents were married and her birth was not initially registered. At the age of five she fell seriously ill with meningitis; when she regained consciousness the first thing that she saw was a bicycle, a present from her parents who by then had married and registered her existence.
Jean and Marthe were politically active, supporting the International Brigades in the Spanish civil war. Anne helped her mother in a solidarity committee to support Spaniards fleeing the Franco regime. They also sympathised with the communists, though her father had reservations, warning his daughter: “In this party, half of them are busy spying on the other half.”
She was educated at the secular Broussais College, an indication of republicanism in a region of France that is traditionally Catholic. Nevertheless, the family were friendly with the local priest and when he introduced equal-sized candles for everyone regardless of their contribution to the offering plate, her parents agreed to her taking her first communion, an event that produced two weeks of “explosive mysticism”.
In July 1940 the Nazis occupied Dinan and Beaumanoir began distributing anti-German leaflets. Around the same time she also started her medical studies in Rennes. Moving to Paris in 1942, she not only had an internship at the Cochin hospital in Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Jacques but also cycled around the city for the communists. “We were printing leaflets and going to cinemas to contradict the lies of filmed news bulletins,” she said. “And then we stole a lot of bikes to get around because we had to avoid taking the Metro.” Speaking in 2018, she added: “In Paris, I was given false papers and ration cards with my new name . . . We only knew the pseudonyms of the other resisters and weren’t allowed to talk about personal things among ourselves.”
According to her memoir, she became pregnant by a German Jew known as Roland but had a termination for “the cause”. In December 1943 she was sent to Lyons to organise an operation that involved “stealing shoes and blankets” and in August 1944 she took part in the liberation of Marseilles, the only time she fired a gun, recalling: “I missed.” After entrusting the Lisopravski children to her parents she returned to resistance work with Roland, who was by then her fiancé. He was arrested by the Gestapo but escaped from a deportation train only to be shot by a French militia who found him hiding in a barn.
She continued with her missions, using code names such as Odile and Soyer, and met Joseph Roger on the street barricades that had been erected in Paris during the final days of the German occupation; they were married in 1948. After the war she resumed her medical studies in Marseilles, becoming a professor of neurology and publishing some significant medical papers on infant epilepsy. By 1957 she had acquired an international reputation and was the first woman to be invited by the Russian Academy of Sciences to study in a Soviet laboratory. Then came her arrest and flight from France.
It was not until the 1990s that Beaumanoir received an amnesty and was permitted to return to her homeland, though she continued to be outspoken and until the age of 90 was helping undocumented migrants. Recently she called for France to accept more Syrian refugees while mobilising her neighbours to provide them with accommodation, saying: “If you give a piece of bread to someone who is hungry, or if you pressure your government to take in more refugees, you are saving humanity.”
Anne Beaumanoir, French resistance fighter and neurophysiologist, was born on October 30, 1923. She died on March 4, 2022, aged 98